In this day and age, most college students have a cornucopia of technology that need to be charged every day before they go off to class. This can result in a desk or a corner of the living room being covered with a web of cords and electronics, or worse, chargers spread all over the house. Because of this, chargers get lost, the charging location will never look clean, and some days, things just won’t get charged.
I happen to be particularly blessed with a few more electronics than the average Joe/Jane. Actually, to most people, the amount of electronics I have would probably be considered excessive. And the more electronics I have obtained, the more necessary it became to have a dedicated charging station in my room.
A simple Google search lead me to novel tabletop USB charging stations that are intended to facilitate a college students’ needs, such as this 7-Port USB Charging Station Dock. It might look good in the picture, but it doesn’t do a good job of organizing the cords unless you plan on keeping all of your cables at only a few inches in length.
Plus, like most college students, not only do I have USB devices that need charging, I also have a laptop and other devices that require a dedicated wall socket themselves. A USB input is just not going to suffice in these cases. On a trip to a local HomeGoods store, an idea struck me when looking at a cheap, broken cabinet.
For a combined $50, I bought a broken cabinet and a slick organizer that would fit my laptop and tablets, as well as my smaller items in its slots. You could probably build a similar setup with raw materials, use an old cabinet/drawer gathering dust in your family’s storage, or find similar items for cheap at a local garage sale. The idea here was to have all of the messy cords hidden away in the top drawer of the cabinet with cables going through holes drilled between the drawer and the organizer above it.
Here’s a summary of the project:
1. Power/Charging Acquirement
In order to make a charging station, first you need to have the equipment necessary to charge your devices. I collectd power strips, USB wall chargers, and charging cables from around the house to fulfill most of my charging needs. If you don’t have a charging cable or enough USB wall chargers I recommend going to the MSC’s Lost-and-Found Sale that is held in Rudder Plaza every semester. There you can get a charging cable and USB wall charger together for $5. Once you’ve got your power supply needs fulfilled and a cabinet or box to hide the cables and power strips, you’re ready to move on to the next step.
SAFETY WARNING: Do not connect a power strip to another power strip! This is called daisy-chaining and could be a fire hazard if you’re plugging in electronics that draw too much power. Plug the power strips into separate wall outlets and not each other, and you should be perfectly fine.
2. Crafting
a. First major step after collecting the cables is to fasten the organizer to the top of the cabinet. Power tools are necessary for this step, so if you don’t have any, just ask around. Texas A&M is a school of mostly engineers, after all, so these shouldn’t be very hard to find.
b. Second step is to drill holes in the backside of the cabinet that lines up with the drawer and through the back of the drawer as well. This hole needs to be big enough to fit one or two power strips through, depending on how many things you need to charge.
c. All that’s left is drilling the holes through the organizer and cabinet into the drawer that will house the power strips! I recommend making these holes large enough to fit multiple cords down each hole, or at least large enough to fit the USB side of a cable down.
3. Restoration
Because I didn’t like the original look of the cabinet, I used drawer knobs and spray paint my father had stockpiled in our garage. Since this isn’t a necessary part of the process, I skipped the details of fixing the cracked frame, painting and knob replacement.
The finished product is charging: two iPads, a MacBook Pro, a portable battery, a Fitbit Blaze, a small Bluetooth speaker, a Nintendo 3DS, and an old iPod Touch, a Gameboy SP, and it still has charging capacity for 5 more devices.
I typically carry at least one portable battery, and this setup makes it so I can have one charging while I’m using the other and switch them out every day. This project makes charging look organized, stylish and helps keep you from ever having to worry about a battery dying on you.